When the Heat is On

Everything rises, falls, starts, stops, and changes. This is going to be one of those more rambling posts about the general challenges in my writing life.

You can stay, go, enjoy the commiseration or the schadenfreude, it’s up to you!

My life’s not falling apart, far from it. Most of what’s happening is going quite well, really, and is good. That’s mostly because I’ve been working my rear end off trying to keep things on track, and make no mistake that bits and pieces are falling off here there. To sum up, this metaphorical vehicle is still rolling along, but it probably didn’t start off as a tricycle.

It’s easy to forget while we’re struggling to find our place and stability in the world that stability is not built-in. Stability isn’t even a feature; it’s a bug we exploit for our gain. We try to be more than we are, and, often, we fail the first few times we try. There are times and places where I just don’t want to write, or work, or do anything. I’ve found that if I force myself to buckle down anyway I eventually get down to it.

I’m doing that right now.

I’ve been sitting here for hours doing next to nothing, except catching up on the news, despite having plenty of work I could be doing. Years of not enough work and being poor have left in a place where I’m paranoid about work I could be doing, as if, when I’m not doing it, the dollars and the time are both slipping through my fingers. It turns out life is made out of little dollar-sign-shaped grains of sand.

Instead, I’m in a weird place right now where I’m actually capped in the number of hours I can work for my main client each month. I’m working on raising the cap, but I’m probably going to hit my ten hour limit this week, and each week thereafter. I could be calling people and doing interviews, which would be kind of fun. But somehow it’s been more than a week since I’ve spent half an hour writing a blog, and that’s not really acceptable either.

Which reminds me of some good news! I’ve got two new short stories awaiting a little clean up, and then they’ll go up here.

So I’m taking the time to other things; working on my own stuff, side-projects, and most of this weekend and week on some revisions to a text I ghostwrote. I haven’t been paid for the previous set of revisions, yet, though, which is complicating my search for a house, since that was an entire month of wages that’s a month overdue now. I don’t doubt this client will pay, but their financial struggles become my financial struggles. Still, it’s not done, and it needs to be done, today. I’ve also got a “meet up” tonight.

Which is to say, I still have things to do, I guess.

I should have been busy all day, but I was busy all weekend, and busy running up to May 31, and I had meetings yesterday, so it’s been awhile since I’ve had a day off. Scratch that, I don’t actually remember the last day I didn’t do at least some work, but I’m sure I spent it doing other stuff that felt a lot like work; Wren and I are still having trouble finding places to live, and she’s not happy in her job (because they’re terrible), and things are, well, in motion as we’ve established to be the natural state of the world.

Maybe it’s some sort of self-defense mechanism, this disengagement, my tired brain’s way of saying, “Hey, there’s a lot going on, lots of big choices happening, and it’s all coming at once. We need to reboot this a couple times before anything big gets decided.”

Some days I fantasize about having a job where I work nine to five and then money appears in my account every other Friday.

At this point, though, that’s not what I’m looking for, and this other weird career I’ve cobbled together is mostly starting to work. I feel like I’ve got the hang of it most months, except when I don’t. But I’d be lying if i didn’t confess I enjoyed that part.

I like the shifting pressures, the changes, and, to some degree, the stress. Even though I do sometimes need to disappear from the world and learn to breathe again.

Only, you can’t breathe right now because, on the subject of degrees, the endless wheel of seasons has rotated back to Summer in Phoenix and if you breathe deeply your lungs combust. It’s supposed to be 114 tomorrow, 118 Saturday. TAgain, that’s degrees, not my age in dog years or something. I say that because you might not be sure I’m talking about given that’s not a temperature you generally encounter on the outside of an oven or pottery kiln.

So suffice to say I won’t be hiking this weekend. I’m headed home to Las Vegas this weekend, though, which will provide a break from the heat, at 110. Again, that’s degrees.

So I leave you with this, which sums up my total feelings on Phoenix quite succintly, courtesy of my friend Gin:

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